Richard Richards, VP of Learning Design
Richard Richards has acquired deep and varied experiences in helping people to realize their full potential. He has lived and worked in the USA, Germany, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong, and acquired additional cross-cultural leadership, organizational development, instructional design, and facilitation skills while leading teams in Australia, Korea, Israel, China, Mariana Islands, Germany, Chile, Argentina and Mexico. As The Ariel Group Vice President of Learning Design, he holds the critical responsibility of ensuring all of Ariel’s work—programs, materials and coaching—achieves the highest level of quality. He works closely with The Ariel Group Leadership Team, Directors of Client Relationships, designers, coaches and facilitators to develop new offerings and maintain existing ones.
Part of Richard's ongoing professional development includes a recent Master of Arts degree in Applied Learning, from the School for New Learning at DePaul University, focusing on “The Use of the Arts in Community Building and Social Change.” This degree began life as “The Use of Theatre to Describe, Understand and Modify People’s Perceptions and Behavior”—a focus that continued to inform his final degree and foreshadowed his relationship with The Ariel Group.
As a professional actor, Richard has studied improvisation at Second City in Chicago and has worked on stage, in voice-over and in film, and dreams of continuing to write and perform narrative monologues – something he has done in the past.
